The film is as lively as a cricket and often very funny, but it's not for the cyberpunk crowd.

While the movie does address white people’s thorny relationship with rap and cultural appropriation, it demonstrates how delicate satirizing that can be when it gets kind of serious near the end — a long, long end — and suggests that being the best at battle rap can also mean being the worst.

Testud, who learned to speak Japanese phonetically for the role, is nothing short of sublime, her expressive face morphing from tear-stained frustration to slaphappy delirium with the speed of lightning flashing across the Tokyo sky.

Far from a spontaneous movie -- the passage of this relationship is mapped from the get-go -- but it is warm and deep, and its visual style bespeaks a new maturity in Leconte.

Director John Dahl ("Red Rock West," "The Last Seduction") has a pronounced knack for snap reversals and out-of-the-blue shocks.

Exquisitely calibrated domestic drama.

This superb debut feature by Korean-American director So Yong Kim seems to be constructed entirely of the ineffable and intangible, those fleeting moments that most movies treat as throwaways.

The emotional truthfulness of Clean enters into our bloodstreams with its muted vigor, and we find ourselves getting hooked by this tale of getting unhooked.

The film's discretion short-circuits any impulse we might have to regard Glennie as a handicapped person who has “overcome.” Instead, we're led to experience her life as she does - as an adventure in which setbacks are not challenges, but illuminations of untracked paths.

Immensely rich, clipped and precise, with a sly, sardonic sense of humor.

McTeer's performance -- one of the best you'll see this year -- makes you realize anew how rare it is to see a female character this complex in American film.

It's Tobey Maguire, doing fine, subtle work, who holds it all together -- he puts a human touch to what is otherwise expertly wrought hokum.

Leaves you with a bland message -- titillation may get your wicky-wack going but love and partnership stay the course -- but the way it gets you there is divine.

The film unfolds as a sort of first-person procedural, a vivid step-by-step account of a reporting trip to hell.

Too bad for Gilliam and everyone involved, but in the departments of spectacle and schadenfreude, great fun for us.

What dazzles still about David Lynch's Blue Velvet is its total authority: Not a single false gesture. No shock delivered solely for its own sake.

There’s nothing preachy about Jinn, even though Nijla Mu’min’s elegant debut feature is about a teenager coming to terms with her mother’s newly embraced religion.

The film is exhaustive -- and ultimately exhausting.

Bollywood meets The Godfather.

Though Kippur seems a creature radically different -- more nakedly autobiographical, more naturalistic, more forgiving -- from Gitai's highly conceptual and stylized body of work, there are clear thematic continuities.

For these gifted directors and their fine ensemble, the notion that every life forms into a mosaic of intimate, largely unobserved details is the story most worth telling.

As it turns out, Shrek 2 is one of the funniest movies I've seen in years. But I'm far from sure that it's a kids' movie anymore, even though, like its predecessor, it's a thoroughly sugared-up reading of the book, by veteran New Yorker cartoonist William Steig, on which both films are based.

Although Zatoichi may disappoint some Kitano purists, who might think it a vanity piece or submission to popular taste -- he's even begun moving his camera -- its pyrotechnics are still audacious and breathtaking.

In many respects a stock item, filled with talking heads, archival film and photographs and vintage concert footage, but what gives the film newfound ache is the copious amount of time it spends on the streets with ordinary citizens (including fledgling young musicians) and the incidentals it captures.

If this is what qualifies, as some critics have suggested, as an artistic advance for Mr. Park, let us pray for a hasty retreat.

It’s the sort of buoyant, all-ages entertainment that Hollywood has been laboring to revive in recent years (most recently with Hairspray) but hasn’t managed to get right until now, and the glue holding it all together is the incomparable Adams (an Oscar nominee for 2005’s Junebug), who gives the kind of blissful screwball performance that seemed to go out of fashion after "I Love Lucy" left the airwaves.

An entertaining tour of this endearing, infuriating absolutist's life and legacy, guided by talking heads more pro than con, prominent among them the former Nader's Raiders who split over their leader's disastrous insistence that there was no difference worth talking about between Democrats and Republicans, yet retain enormous affection for his wit, integrity and incorruptible sense of mission.

The music, it goes without saying, is great.